World of Warcraft subscribers are getting five days of extra game time due to Warlords of Draenor's "subpar launch"

Warlords of Draenor’s launch has been very shaky, worse than any WoW expansion launch that I can remember. Our Nick, who has left behind sleep and a social life to review it, spent the first few days queuing more than playing, and when he did get in, he found himself trapped in his garrison.

At least he managed to get in, something I haven’t managed to do since the first hour of the launch. But I really gave up trying after two days. It’s unfortunate, but all is not lost. Or at least money and time isn’t, because everyone with a subscription from November 14th just got five free days of game time.

In a message to the WoW community, executive producer J. Allen Brack apologised for what he called a “subpar launch”, while also explaining what Blizzard have done to alleviate the problems a lot of players have been facing.

“The first two days of the expansion were not a great experience, with many of you facing high queues or significant gameplay problems. We worked around the clock to tackle the demand issues and technical challenges, and fortunately things started looking better on Saturday. While millions of you were able to get in and play over the weekend, with many already reaching level 100, others still ran into very lengthy queues, particularly on the highest-population realms.

“To help address this, we’ve expanded the new instancing tech we used to improve queues on Saturday and we’re continuing the process of applying that to raise the capacity of all realms again. This will result in approximately double the prelaunch capacity on each realm, which should greatly reduce queue times for most realms if not eliminate queues altogether.”